"The Oppressed Have a Way of Addressing Their Own Conditions" - On Joshua Myers' Cedric Robinson: The Time of the Black Radical Tradition

In this episode we host Joshua Myers, to talk about his recently published book Cedric Robinson: The Time of the Black Radical Tradition. Folks will recall that last year we had a conversation with Josh Myers about Cedric Robinson much of which centered around the content and concepts within Black Marxism. 

While there is a slight overlap between this conversation and that one, the two are quite distinct and mutually inform each other. So we invite folks to revisit that alongside this conversation, or to listen to both for the first time to get a more complete picture of Myers’ extensive knowledge and analysis of Robinson’s life and work. Beyond that of course we encourage folks to pick up this book as it really does a great job of grounding Robinson’s intellectual work within the context of his life, organizing and relationships.

In this conversation we talk more about young Cedric’s developing anti-imperialist and anti-colonial consciousness. His disenchantment with the aims, strategies and tactics of the Civil Rights Movement. His critiques of leadership, and analysis of charisma, which set the ground for his first book The Terms of Order. And we discuss how Robinson’s work has always aimed to assault the foundations of academic disciplines.

We discuss the relationship between Robinson and CLR James, and the practices of study and development of undercommons spaces for colleagues and students. We also talk about the relationship between Cedric and Immanuel Wallerstein and Modern World Systems Theory. 

We talk briefly about the arguments Robinson takes up in An Anthropology of Marxism and Forgeries of Memory and Meaning and of course we can’t resist a couple of questions on recent readings, mis-readings, and non-readings of Robinson’s most well-known work Black Marxism.

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